Complicated Age: Passion, hobbies, and aging through the lens of Complex Age

Content Warning: Brief mentions of suicidality, dysphoria, and fatphobia

Spoilers for all of Complex Age

Sakuma Yui’s Complex Age came to me in June 2016, right on the cusp of my departure to Japan. I’d just finished my Masters and for the first time in my life, I’d be leaving America. Gone was my time as a student: I was stepping into adulthood and finding a manga where the cast of characters mirrored maintaining a hobby familiar to me–cosplay–while being expected to meet markers of maturity felt like a warm hug, making those tender first steps even easier.

And at its core Complex Age is a story about passion and growing older. It’s a story about the passion of a hobby that consumes you, about the passion of wanting to live in the moment of the snick of a camera’s shutter forever. It’s all about growing into a hobby and growing old with it.

It’s about the hobby being so intimate to you that you can barely breath without it. 

At least, that’s the way it is for protagonist Kataura “Nagi” Nagisa, who actively hides her cosplay from her coworkers and her parents. After all, who amongst us hasn’t hid a nerdy hobby? Perhaps not as much now, but I certainly hid my passions as I got older, revealing the cards I held close to my chest less and less as time has gone on.

Nagi holds her cards close too, feigning “normalcy” at her day job while cleverly calculating funds on a weekly basis to dedicate to her true passion: cosplay. And dedicate  herself she does, squeezing herself into the 2D image of her favorite character, the titular Magical Ururu, a red riding hood-type of girl with all the magic in the world in her eyes and a cute catchphrase to summon her power…until someone tells her she’s too old to play a magical girl.

This isn’t just a story about passion: Complex Age is also a story about challenging what it means to be passionate and what it means to see that love change.

When I was in high school, I would go out in public in cosplay, often scrounged from the local Ross or whatever adaptable pieces of clothing I had in my closet. I’m sure pictures of my costumes–a Kingdom Hearts Moogle, multiple Yamine Aku (an inspired Hatsune Miku derivative) and close/street-style Yoruichi costumes–still exist online, as do defunct YouTube videos. 

I have memories of being chased–bullied–around the mall while in full cosplay, a point of pride for my teenage self. Similarly, I have SD Cards stuffed with snapshots of weekend trips to A-Kon and AnimeFest in downtown Dallas, Nakakon in Kansas City. The now defunct Borders books in my hometown was where I shot footage for my first Vocaloid music video. There are memories upon memories of who I used to be, preserved on fuzzy digital cameras from the 00s. 

I had this unbridled passion for wearing costumes, for begging my mother to put trim on things, for sporting hot glue burns with pride as I taught myself how to piece together a look. I continued this into college, where I obtained a sewing machine and began to savor piecing together costumes on a tight budget. It was like riding a roller coaster, chasing a dopamine high, and I devoured each moment, starry-eyed and focused on entering competitions and demonstrating just how good I was as a journeyman. I never won any awards and barely had any technical know-how, but you know what? I didn’t care. I was in it for the love of the game, and for nearly a decade–even into my time in Japan–I was into cosplay. I finished my hobby/career as Nanami Chiaki in 2017, unknowingly ending my time with a bang.

But adulthood has a way of chewing up passion, and as life changed–and my ability to adequately mask and not feel overwhelmed by the constant performance of adulthood–cosplay became less accessible and fun. It ties me much more to Sawako, Nagi’s mother.

Sawako’s story is simple: she’s a Gothic Lolita dedicated to dressing up even on the most simple occasion. She breathes lace, exhales ribbon, and has an entire room dedicated to decorating herself. But eventually, life catches up: rather, ageism and the progression of what being an adult should be catches her off guard, wholly shattering her relationship to the clothing that once defined her. She bags up her life, gets in the car, and in a final act of turning her back on those proverbial childish things, sets those bags full of precious clothes and accessories and dreams on fire.

Like Sawako, my life was changing all too fast: I felt distanced from my body, trapped in my own mind, and started to feel at odds with wearing feminine clothing. I was changing and my friends weren’t, or maybe they were changing and I was stuck in the past. Cosplay was my life raft in the sinking ship of my life. I needed it more than ever—or I at least needed to feel grounded in who I had been expected to be. Yet in the wake of my passion falling apart, I had to face the truth years later while living in Japan and becoming an adult: I had no hobbies outside of my love of Japanese culture.

I’d stopped watching anime, played fewer and fewer video games, and had given up my passion for cosplay and alternative Japanese clothing. I barely read, despite installing more and more bookshelves in my apartment. Cosplay, and the thought of it, were the proverbial manna that had previously sustained me, as was being defined as something of an otaku. Now, living abroad, I was a shadow of that version of me, reduced down to bullet points instead of a dynamic whole.

Then years later, something would come and start to gently fill the gap previous passion had left in its wake.

While Complex Age is primarily about cosplay, there’s an underpinning of hobbies in general: Nagi is first and foremost a cosplayer, but her friend Kimiko is a photographer, refocusing the broad context from a cosplay manga to a story about inner passion and its place in a community where stepping outside of yourself and becoming a character takes precedence over the mundanity of your day-to-day. 

This is, of course, complicated by the simple fact of existing: Nagi, a deeply passionate cosplayer, wants to continue her art. Kimiko, however, is somewhat bullied into stepping into the background by a younger girl named Rui who, at the start of the series, Nagi openly criticizes for not taking cosplay seriously. It’s a classic case of “what goes around, comes around,” though Rui’s place in the story challenges Nagi and Kimiko both by positing the question, “What does it mean to be a cosplayer?”

For Nagi, it’s similar to that passion I once contained, an all-consuming desire to perfect costumes, to grow and be the best representation of a character possible. She eats, sleeps, and breathes cosplay. Her room is full of inspiration merch, ranging from multiple DVD and Bluray sets to figures, garage kits, and of course, a dress form with her Ururu costume. She is willingly consumed by passion, and in many ways, it’s like watching a star before it goes supernova: brilliant, radiant, and haunting in its foreshadowing.

But…it’s also a form of gatekeeping that, while addressed, was reflected in how I felt about costumes. Being fat–in fact, being a lifelong superfat–meant that I felt that the masculine cosplays I could do still limited my body. When I tried to crossplay as N from Pokemon, tried to minimize my 50D bust and wide, feminine hips, I still felt like there was a neon sign saying, “GIRL GIRL FAT FAT GIRL!” over my body, a pejorative echoed by Nagi’s intense dieting and focus on making her body into a tool that mars her story with fatphobia instead of a part of her cosplay arsenal that is acceptable at any weight.

Yet at 32-almost-33, I find it easier to embrace Kimiko’s perspective, not because I crave to be perfect for a costume or desire to be the right tool for the trade, but simply of where I am. As a person in mental health recovery, I find myself yearning for a stable future where my body is simply just what it is. I also want a passionate life: after all, I’ve been into Japanese culture since I was twelve. I can’t imagine a life without it. But I also want to see that passion transform because I can no longer keep up with fandom. Yet what is the nature of that transformation? What will I have to sacrifice along the way?

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, so sayeth 1 Corinthians 13:11. But I am no longer a child, and as the verse continues, not a man: I do not yearn to put away the passion of childhood away, to decide I’m too old for hobbies. I don’t want to wither or settle for being mundanely content. Instead, I’d like to transform my former passion into something new—a zest and zeal for a life where I openly embrace what I love and who it makes me.

Crochet, and fiber arts in general, is that new passion. I started in 2021, when my hands needed something to keep them occupied and it’s a hobby I’ve done for about four years. It loves me, and I love it, but it’s also Facebook-levels of complicated now because loving a hobby–loving something that makes you uniquely and wholly you–is strange when you’ve survived multiple suicide attempts and kind of had your brain rewired in a healthier, more stable way. 

There’s a schism between the person who existed and the entity that carries that–i.e., the you in the present now. For me, there’s this strange fracture in my ability to feel passion when it comes to video games, anime, manga, and fiber arts. I yearn to turn on my consoles, to devour a pile of manga, desire so deeply to sit down on my couch with an assortment of beverages and snacks, and binge a series until I’m satisfied. I ache so deeply that it hurts, but I can barely access the ability to follow through. Instead, I sit transformed, back at the start, an amateur with experience.

Yet on even my worst days, I still wake up and pick up my hook and create, even if it’s just a single row of stitches. I reread this series for this piece. I am starting to find watching more than one episode a day feasible. Maybe, that’s just enough to reignite my fire. 

Maybe that’s where I need to start.

Toward the end of the story, Kimiko expresses a desire to leave cosplay behind, to step behind the camera once and for all as she looks towards marriage and a future path that doesn’t include fandom front and center. For her, cosplay was the gateway into photography, but now Kimiko is capable of taking photos of the entire world. Her lens doesn’t solely focus on cosplay: instead, she reveals herself to be quite skilled at everyday photography.

In any other story, this schism would have broken pacing. It might have even shattered the immersion of what Complex Age is skillfully doing. But because this story is so structured, instead, the result is that Nagi finally sees her best friend as a fully complicated person: that is, Nagi sees that her passion for performing cosplay is hers and that Kimiko has found a similar love behind the camera.

Kimiko, like myself, will likely never don a costume again. Instead, she’ll watch the world of cosplay through a viewfinder, cataloguing the evolving world of cosplay while enjoying being behind the scenes. It stands in contrast to Nagi, who can’t let cosplay go because to let it go would be akin to crushing her heart: she’ll likely always be front and center at an event. Both aspects represent the sides of a hobby, emphasizing that no two people are the same in their approach.

In one of the final asides of the series, Sakuma Yui states that hobbies are just hobbies, but also that they’re hobbies, and that that matters: there’s no right answer to how a person approaches them or the terms we set around them. But for Nagi, there is: there’s a gulf of definition to explore to figure out the “why” of her cosplaying passion. 

So what’s a woman, or a person in a broader case, to do when it all falls apart?

The answer is to seek advice, at least for Nagi. In this case, said advice comes in the form of Nori, Sawako’s friend and something of a play auntie by proxy. Unlike Sawako who gave up wearing Gothic Lolita fashion, Nori has evolved from wearing it into her forties to wearing stylish, remade kimono coordinates that mirror her gothic roots but also, have matured with her age. She suggests Nagi figure out why she likes cosplay before making any final decisions: it’s a simple suggestion, but it begs Nagi to be introspective about her own passions.

So Nagi tries to quit, cold turkey—specifically, she stops when she realizes that maybe she’s gotten too old to play at being a magical girl when there’s younger cosplayers who are more “true” to the character. It’s that same schism again, that gap in who we are versus the perception of our place in time. Yet when she does ultimately try to be something of a “civilian”, she ends up at  the Yuzawaya in Shinjuku, back where she’s spent her time buying the right fabric, the right trim, the right things to bring a character from the TV screen to life. Whereas Kimiko can depart from cosplay to a life where she’s always on the other side as a fan, Nagi just can’t quit. And why should she? Is it so wrong to love something so much you never want to give it up?

I, like Nagi, stand on the cusp of a decision: do I put away my passions and resolve myself to steadily see them with my back to a future I can’t yet perceive? Or do I just keep going for the hell of it, just because I want to love what I once loved again? And why do I love them? Why do I have an entire KALLAX shelf of yarn that I’ve barely used? Why can’t I touch my spinning wheel? Why have I surrounded myself with video games and manga and things that I love but can’t seem to bring myself to touch?

The answer is simple. Because I love them and I just can’t give up what I love.

There is no need to put away childish things. There’s no need to abandon the things that have formed me. I’ll likely never cosplay again, but picking up my camera? Making a capsule wardrobe with my crochet hooks and knitting needles? Pouring hours into video games? Why the hell not? The sky is the limit when we free ourselves from expectations, when we set the standard as enjoying something just to feel the human experience of passion.

In the end, Kimiko says it best: “It’s a hobby, so it should be enough just to have fun.” So maybe, it’s enough that I just want to find a way to love my hobbies again. Maybe that’s what will sustain me.

When this article goes live, I will have seven days before my birthday, and I highly doubt I’ll figure out the right steps to ignite my ability to enjoy my hobbies with unbridled passion. Thus, this article has a very human and unsatisfactory conclusion, if we look at it head-on: I still don’t know how to recapture my desire and the passion I once felt. I have desire, sure, but I don’t have a roadmap.

Instead, I just have to try and see where that effort takes me. 

As always, thanks goes to the AniFem team. I’m glad I had this article in me: it’s nice to look at my life through the lens, and hopefully, offer comfort from my screen to yours. Having the space and ability to write pieces like this, especially about a manga series so dear to me, fills me with the hope that as I continue to recover from what I call The Great Cypression (a.k.a. my very bad 2024) I’ll find a new path to tread in the name of creativity. I don’t know what terms I’ll use to define my passion but I have a feeling I’ll figure it all out and maybe, just maybe, I’ll redefine what passion means to me as well.